pterjan's diary

e1000e corruption epilog

Last night Intel folks posted a patch protecting the card (marking the memory read only, and disabling the possibility to set it read/write until next reboot). That means that it's now much safer to use e1000e with this patch applied than disabling it.

Thank you for the hard work over the last weeks and for providing the patch before final 2.6.27 and right on time for final Mandriva 2009.0 isos :)

An ugly patch for pidgin/metacity interaction

Long ago I remember Ubuntu people starting to complain that the fix in metacity for firefox3 jumping between desktops broke the trayicon behaviour of several apps, including pidgin.

I'm now facing this as the patch is now included by several more distros (Fedora, and more important for me, Mandriva). I had a look at the various bug reports (Ubuntu, Fedora, GNOME) and could not find any fix for this, while it makes pidgin getting really unusable! (I did not look at the ticket on pidgin website as it kept timeouting as usual)

So I decided to write this very small (and ugly) patch to have again a correct behaviour when clicking on the trayicon.

Scare your bugs away with Nemiver

On last Saturday I investigated make check failing in glib on my GNOME build slave. One of the tests was segfaulting so I was about to use gdb but as I did not want to install and I heard that Nemiver has libtool support, I decided to install it.

I started it and... the test did not crash. Then I started the test again in the shell and it did not crash either. Just installing Nemiver was enough to fix the bug!

OK, the real explanation is that installing Nemiver pulled in desktop-file-utils which was needed for this test.

Mandriva Linux 2009 Released

Mandriva Linux 2009 was released this morning and is already available on mirrors or bittorrent. As usual you will find the packages and iso images (Free containing only Free Software and One which is a live CD with proprietary drivers). Commercial edition (PowerPack) is also available with proprietary software like LightZone.

Amongst a lot of changes, it contains GNOME 2.24 (and KDE 4.1), and a new design for the installer and the control center which had not changed over the last few years.

Some work has also been done to improve again boot time (we had not worked on that for a few years and it was more than time to improve it again).

Another point which should not be visible for most people is tcb integration and the use of pam_tcb instead of pam_unix.

To read more about what's new in this release, you can follow the Release Tour.

Apple fail

OK this is an American company so ASCII should be enough but would be great if their French website was checked by some French speaking people.

So, their new product can be seen there. As they will fix it, here is a screenshot. Wonderful description of the product "Parfaitement con", meaning "Totally stupid", or more literally "Perfectly cunt".

The image for English version of this sentence:

The image for French version of this sentence:

The logical explanation is that French sentence started by "Parfaitement conçu" (perfectly designed) and the tool creating the image failed on the first non ASCII character...

Using Gimp 2.6 on my laptop

I first launched the new Gimp today and was very annoyed with the toolboxes staying in front of my photo. My laptop has a 1024x768 screen, so that mean that by default I only see the center of the image and not even the full menu bar.

I found a preference which made it usable again : Window Management / Window Manager Hints, set the 2 options to "Normal Window". The main issue with that so far is that the layers/channels/paths/undo window sometimes flashes in the taskbar and disappeared behind all windows (not only gimp ones) when closing the preferences dialog. Maybe I should only change the preference for the toolbox and let the other docks staying on top...

Update: Thanks to Philip's comment, I can now work in full screen, put the setting back and use TAB to display the windows only when needed. That's actually great :)